With the advent of the 10-day disabled lists the MLB saw an uptick in the number of DL visits in 2017. But the only thing that matters to us fantasy ballers is how it affects our leagues? One initial response I’ve seem from some in my leagues is that we need more DL spots. On the surface it makes sense, but when you dig a bit below the surface, I don’t think it’s really true.
Before I make any official statements let me say that this all depends on the composition of your league’s roster definition. How many players in your active lineup, how many bench players and how many DL spots do you already have. In most cases I don’t think the introduction of the 10-day DL changes things. That is, of course, unless your league’s settings already had you on the fence or you were already in a compromising (under-benched) situation.
In one of my leagues there have been a few requests for an additional DL spot in response to the 10-day DL. When considering how to deal with this, here is how I decided to proceed.
The fairest way to decide if there should be an additional DL spot was to examine the number of DL stints last year as opposed to previous season. A bit below are the number of DL stints for the last three seasons. 15-day DL visits went from 423 (2015) down to 358 (2016) and then up to 495 (2017) when the 15-day became the 10-day. I could not find data prior to 2015. So according to the numbers, there was an average of 393 15-day DL visits in 2015/16. In 2017 there were 102 additional visits. While this sounds like a lot, it’s not. Playing the law of averages game (not an exact science) let’s say all 102 of those additional visits were associated with a player rostered on a team in your league. This is very unlikely, but worst case scenario. Across 12 teams, that would be an additional 8.5 DL visits per team over the course of the season. But let’s be real here, maybe half of those 102 visits are actually relevant. Many were to players that not even rostered. That cuts the number of additional DL stints to about 4 per team over the year. Given this, I couldn’t justify adding another DL spot.
Here are the DL stint stats:
2015 – 423 15-Day DL, 151 60-Day DL
2016 – 358 15-Day DL, 172 60-Day DL
2017 – 495 10-Day DL, 166 60-Day DL
Before you mention the 7-day DL there were only 15 players that visited the 7-day DL last season.
Teams that get ravaged by the DL are going to have to make some tough decisions on cutting a player loose. The alternative is to deal with a tight bench. This is all part of running your team. The solution of throwing another DL spot at this problem just takes away from the managerial experience.
I mentioned earlier that this mostly depends on your league specific settings. In my case the league settings dictate 23 active lineup spots (2 C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, 6 OF, UT, 6 SP, 2 RP), 7 bench spots and 2 DL spots. Perhaps I’m being biased, but that seems like a fairly substantial bench. A seven player bench is thirty percent of the active roster size. Throw in two DL spots and you’ve got nine spots outside of the active lineup. Maybe I’m just crazy, but adding another DL spot just seems like unnecessary overkill.
I’m trying to work out a formula for determining the appropriate number of DL spots, but I’m far from the right person to do this. Here’s what I’m playing with at the moment. And bear with me here because this is totally a work in progress.
1. The number of bench spots should be equal to 25 percent of the size of your active roster. So if you start 20 players, then you should have 5 bench spots.
2. The number of DL spots should be 10 percent of the size of your active roster. Starting 20 players you would then have 2 DL spots.
The thing is, the above example works out nicely because I picked a round number of 20 which resulted in whole numbers. So let’s pick a number like 17 and apply my rules from above.
1. Bench spots is 25 percent of 17 which is 4.25. For bench spots I say we round up.
2. DL spots is 10 percent of 17 which is 1.7. For DL spots I say we round down for any values under .8
So this league would have 17 active players, 5 bench players and 1 DL spot. Seems reasonable to me.
If we go back to my example earlier from my actual league with 23 active players and apply the formula we end up with:
1. Bench spots is 25 percent of 23 which is 5.75. That gives up 6 bench spots when we round up.
2. DL spots is 10 percent of 23 which is 2.3. Rounding down gives us 2 DL spots.
This, coupled with my explanation of how I just don’t see the increase in DL stints really having a substantial effect on teams, is why I wouldn’t add another DL spot. You might also notice that the formula says 6 bench spots, but my league has 7. There are two reasons for this. First is because I crafted this league over two years ago (before coming up with these pseudo formulas), and second is because this is a daily lineups league. Either way, the extra bench spot certainly nullifies the need for an extra DL spot.
Here’s what I will say. If you are in a league with only one disabled list spot and your active roster is 20+ players, your league might be in the market for one more DL spot. So in some (few) cases it makes sense, but in the majority I just don’t think the 10-day DL changes day-to-day operations. Throwing another DL spot into the mix simply because of the 10-day DL seems like more a knee jerk reaction than anything.
How has the 10-day DL affected your league? How did your league respond?
